Setting a Table in the Age of COVID

4 December 2020

It’s been a difficult season for someone who loves hospitality as much as I do. My image of fellowship is a joyfully-crammed table with just room for one more, where food is served without gloves and conversation carves out space where people feel seen, where we linger in communion over empty dishes and the refilling of coffee cups until the last guest leaves.

But now, contact is defined by 15 minutes in a room with someone else. Closer than six feet apart. Mask or no mask. It doesn’t matter. 

I don’t like that I intentionally timed a lot of my interactions with others to 15 minutes in the name of safety. I hated the sheepish words, “I probably shouldn’t” that came out of my mouth when I was invited to sit at a table that exceeded the 4 person capacity. I hated not being able to hug people and hated the feeling of guilt that I felt when I broke my personal convictions about not hugging people. My heart sank every time I received a text from someone I knew, telling me that they were going into quarantine for the next two weeks. This semester has been exhausting, emotionally draining, and isolating. 

It's been a frustrating time to try and set tables full of bounty. But I think it’s in these awkward and liminal spaces, where we least expect Christ to be, is actually where Christ meets us the most. 

Hospitality has taken forms I never dreamed. Making meals, writing notes, and hand-delivering them to quarantined friends and quarantine houses all over campus. Hosting socially distant picnics while the weather allowed. Having conversations with people, masks on, about the ways they’ve felt the closeness of Christ, even in isolation. Celebrating those released from quarantine with homemade chocolate cake or banana bread. And, of course, making the pottery that you see in my sister’s online shop for the month of December.

Last spring, when I was registering for classes, I snagged the last seat in Wheel-Thrown Ceramics, and it was one of the biggest blessings of this turbulent fall semester. These pieces carry my longing for times before COVID when we could feast without caution or anxiety. They are uniquely marked by the hospitality that I have chosen to engage in the midst of the pandemic. And they are formed into being with the whispers of transformed hope for the tables that we will set when COVID is no more.

So, my prayer is that these pieces will travel from my artist hands to yours, almost as if I’m holding your hand or wrapping you in a warm embrace, saying “Soon, friend.” I hope that these pieces serve as placeholders of the abundant fellowship and communion that is to come, small enactments of resistance to the avarice and fear around us.  

I promise you, dear friend, that one day we can set tables without awkward, six-feet-apart spacing of chairs. That one day, we will serve food without masks, latex gloves, or anxiety. That hospitality will once again be intimate and abundant. These pieces were made as tangible promises of closeness for your tables—when the stay-at-home orders are issued and when the travel bans are lifted. This is the closeness that we receive in daily resurrection and walking with Christ during a pandemic. 

Good courage, friends! 

Katie 

IG: @_sobremesapottery